Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  Something hard to grasp and at the same time quite easy.

  As if I do not want to force things, it feels like. There are certain patterns, things must run their course even on this island. I have plenty of time left, and so even if I haven’t received any decisive signs yet, it seems to me as if I’ve come to the right place. Yet of course this feeling is not particularly sustainable, and perhaps it is just that fragility that means that I don’t want to burden it.

  An injured bird wing, which slowly heals but still will not hold for a real flight. An embryo that is growing and growing, but that would be annihilated by the sunlight.

  Especially this mercilessly flooding sun.

  A bird, that is exactly how she described herself when we got together. A bird with an injured wing.

  Until I am healed again I can’t give, she said. Only receive.

  I liked that a lot. From the start it provided the framework for our relationship and I went along with it without protest. It took almost a month before we made love for real; this too appealed to me. Gave me time to finish another affair too, which I wasn’t really done with.

  When we got married she was still my injured bird. Then she lost two children before they had become fully developed and viable, and this probably sealed our alliance. It was after the second miscarriage that my strength was no longer sufficient to fill the vacuum of her weakness. For a year we lived in separate worlds; I started looking out for myself as the prerogative of the strong male, Ewa kept herself enclosed behind the curtains of illness.

  ‘Adagio,’ Ewa would say during this period. ‘Right now we are in the adagio. There is nothing strange about that.’

  And of course there wasn’t.

  I only met Mauritz Winckler three or four times, and he did not make a favourable impression on me. There was a kind of reproachful self-importance in his conduct and in his way of speaking, even about the most insignificant trivialities. After Ewa was discharged we had a few splendid arguments and it came to blows a couple of times, but we reconciled and left the battles strengthened. Mauritz Winckler, however, could never understand this; even if he never brought it up, his prejudiced attitude shone through all his screens of words and smiles.

  No, Mauritz Winckler never understood this morality play about the injured bird and the rights and obligations of the stronger one, and I had an unusually hard time tolerating him.

  From the beginning. Long before he became my wife’s lover.

  Twilight falls quickly, darkness grows out of the corners. I am lying on my bed and watch the contours of the room being erased. Try to recall them for my inner eye, my wife and her lover, but the images are false and stay there at most a couple of seconds. I fumble for the retsina glass on the nightstand. Find it and take a deep gulp.

  Think for a while about the miserable drama of life I wrote a few days ago. Try to understand how it would be possible to create some kind of point and meaning, and only come up with the bitter answer I already have.

  As is intended, evidently. I don’t leap headfirst into just any line of reasoning. It is of course for the sake of bitterness that I am lying here in the warm darkness on this martially lovely island.

  Solely and simply because of that.

  Mariam Kadhar’s account of the night of 19 and 20 November took – with interruptions for questions and interjections from the prosecutor, lawyers and judge – forty-five minutes, and when she was done I think it was clear to every single member of the jury that she was guilty.

  Her shoulders were relaxed and resting the whole time, her voice never failed, yet even so, slowly but surely, she sowed the seeds of conviction in all of us.

  Guilty.

  Then nothing helped.

  No sympathy. No marble-white collarbones and no murky circumstances.

  Otto Gerlach’s testimony followed after a very brief pause, and even though he in many respects gave a different impression than his lover, he was hardly able to straighten out the situation. In all essentials he presented the same version of events and circumstances that Mariam Kadhar had, and actually his vain attempts probably served no purpose other than to nail down and impress all the gloomy facts that framed the great Germund Rein’s evil, sudden death. As could be read in any of the newspaper accounts the following day.

  Both of them admitted – with no evasions – that they had a relationship; for almost three years, even if to start with it had been sporadic. The matter – both M and G emphasized – was mainly of a sexual nature, and had its roots in Rein’s manifest incapacity within this field. In connection with this explanation the prosecutor asked a number of rather insinuating questions and also managed to ensnare, primarily, Mariam Kadhar a little; I could clearly see how the goodwill was extinguished in several of the audience member’s faces while she tried to explain herself, and how moralistic furrows appeared between the nostrils and mouths of two of the women on the jury as they observed her. To the question of why Rein was not initiated into the whole thing, Mariam Kadhar laughed and showed with a simple motion of her head what she thought about the prosecutor’s insights into these sorts of affairs.

  This did not produce a particularly positive impression either.

  As far as facts were concerned, Otto Gerlach had – as agreed – appeared out at the Cherry Orchard about seven o’clock on the evening of 19 November. The idea had been – it was maintained in any event – that Helmut Rühdegger, one of the editors at the publishing house, should have accompanied him, but he had a conflict – of what type, however, they were unable to specify more closely. I remember that I felt some irritation about this; it must have been the simplest thing in the world to check this piece of information with Rühdegger himself, but this had evidently not been done, either by the plaintiffs’ or the defendants’ side.

  In any event, the three of them ate and drank gamely at the shoreline villa, and rather early on it was clear that Germund Rein was in his very worst mood – an almost adolescent mixture of megalomania and smouldering self-contempt that is not particularly unusual among authors and other creative types (according to Otto Gerlach, who evidently thought he knew what he was talking about). Neither of them felt, however, that Rein harboured any suspicions about his wife and his publisher. Neither on this fateful occasion nor earlier in the autumn. I must say that I did not really understand their persistence on this point. It was obvious after all – at least at the time of the trial – that Rein had strong, well-grounded suspicions, and what it would actually serve to distance themselves from this was hard for me to get a handle on. Both then, in the courtroom, and later. Even so, they denied categorically that the author’s bad mood that evening could have been related in some way to their shady relationship.

  Sometime around midnight – quarter to twelve according to M, five minutes past according to G – Rein had had enough of the company. With a cognac bottle in hand he staggered upstairs to the top floor, told both of them to go to hell and locked himself in his room. It was agreed that Otto Gerlach would sleep over, but despite this, and despite the host’s obvious intoxication, they did not take the opportunity, they maintained, to share a bed that night. At about one thirty they got up from the leather armchairs and each of them instead withdrew to their own room. Otto Gerlach stated that he then read for a while in bed and fell asleep sometime between quarter past two and two thirty. Mariam Kadhar fell asleep – according to her own statement – the moment she put her head on the pillow.

  That was all, by and large. The next morning Otto Gerlach was the first one on his feet a few minutes past ten, but it was not for another hour and a half that Mariam Kadhar discovered the letter in the typewriter in Rein’s room. Before this she had knocked and called a few times, but had not wanted to disturb her husband if he wished to be left alone, she maintained. At last, she went into the room anyway.

  The letter was no secret. The prosecutor read it out aloud and asked if it was identical with what had been in the typewriter. Both M and G testifie
d that such was the case.

  He also asked how they viewed the circumstance that there was not a single fingerprint from Rein on the sheet of paper, but here neither of them could submit any further reasonable explanation, and on both occasions I observed the frowns in the jury.

  Concerning the other letters, the ones I dug out from under the sundial, both Mariam Kadhar and Otto Gerlach adopted a viewpoint that aroused some astonishment. During the trial as well as in the newspapers’ analyses afterwards.

  All the letters were written on the same typewriter, experts had determined; a little portable Triumf/Adler, which belonged to Gerlach and which normally was in his office at the publishing house, but which he sometimes brought with him on his travels. The prosecutor wondered with some surprise why he didn’t make use of a more modern apparatus in our computerized society, but the head of the publishing house simply answered that he always preferred honourable old typewriters to word processors.

  The crux was the fourth letter. That G was behind the first three was not particularly veiled, he admitted the declarations of love without the slightest hesitation, but concerning the fourth one – where the murder plot itself was outlined; the thoughts of taking Rein’s life – he firmly denied that he ever would have written something like that.

  Mariam Kadhar asserted the same thing. She maintained she had never read these lines before she did so at the police station – if she had, she would have immediately broken off all connections with its author, she swore that firmly. This fourth letter was, like the others, vaguely dated . . . late autumn 199–, but because the planned weekend at the Cherry Orchard was mentioned as if imminent, it was the prosecutor’s understanding, at least, that it must have been written sometime during a fourteen-day period right before Rein’s death.

  To the prosecutor’s question of whether there was any explanation for how this fourth letter ended up among Mariam Kadhar’s undergarments and later under the sundial, neither of the two accused had anything to offer, and perhaps it spoke a bit to their advantage that they did not try to offer theories and speculations in one direction or another. Concerning the original and the copies in the bureau, Mariam Kadhar explained that she discarded them a few weeks after her husband’s death, and the prosecutor did not seem interested in pressing her further on that point.

  ‘Were you familiar with Gargantua?’ he asked instead.

  Gargantua was Rein’s boat.

  ‘Of course,’ Mariam Kadhar answered without visible concern.

  ‘Naturally,’ Otto Gerlach answered an hour later. ‘It was just an ordinary outboard motorboat. No oddities at all.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said the prosecutor.

  In both cases.

  No, I was certainly not the only one who had the impression that it was all decided as Mariam Kadhar left the witness stand with lowered head. The last peculiar circumstance that the prosecutor brought up was of a financial nature, and that it made her ill at ease was evident enough.

  During the weeks immediately before that fateful evening, Mariam Kadhar had made two large withdrawals from one of Rein’s bank accounts, to which she had right of disposal.

  One hundred thousand gulden on 7 November and one hundred and ten thousand gulden eight days later. To the direct question of what the money would be used for she could only say that Rein had asked her to withdraw the amounts in question, and that she had no idea what he intended to do with it.

  ‘Did you usually withdraw amounts of that magnitude for him?’ the prosecutor asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Sometimes before, maybe.’

  ‘Without you knowing what he would do with the money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what do you think he used it for this time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He didn’t answer.’

  ‘Don’t you think that was strange?’

  She hesitated a little.

  ‘Maybe. My husband was an unusual person.’

  ‘I have no doubt of that. In any event we have not been able to establish that he made any use of the money. What do you say about that?’

  She shrugged her shoulders again.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘No.’

  The prosecutor paused to make room for the next question.

  ‘And it was not the case that you kept the money for yourself?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Not on any of those occasions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have anything that can prove that you really turned over the money to your husband?’

  She thought about it.

  ‘No.’

  And, if I remember right, it was after this simple statement that she was allowed to leave the stand.

  I came out of the courtroom with a feeling of exhaustion, but also with a sense that it was over now; a sort of bitter relief like after a visit to the dentist, roughly.

  The next few days this feeling stayed with me. I wandered around in the city without either a goal or urgency; sat in the parks or the cafes and read and observed people, and allowed myself to enjoy the beautiful weather fairly unconcerned. Time seemed thinned out anew; I could hardly avoid noticing that – how once again I seemed to find myself in a period of emptiness and transparency. A waiting room for a delayed train. I read in the newspapers about the various speculations before the verdict, of course, and about the ado about the book and the copyright issue, but in general I was unaffected by it all. I understood that my role was settled, and that now I could sit here at Gambrinus or Mefisto or Vlissingen and observe the drama with the same raised eyebrow as anyone else.

  I didn’t drink very much those days either. True, I sat at the bars in the evening, but was usually home with Beatrice long before midnight, and when Janis Hoorne called and wanted to take me out to the sea, I declined and asked to postpone the arrangement until some later time. I think we agreed on early June; I still had no idea if it ever would be June this year.

  Naturally I knew that the temporary hollow of rest and distance would not last forever. On the contrary, it was rather obvious that this only concerned a period of necessary vacuity before the next concentration. The next sluggish accumulation of meteorites in the warp of time.

  The intensification came – as was intended – in connection with the end of the week right in the middle of May.

  On Friday, the judgement was pronounced in the Rein case. I heard about it on the radio on one of the morning news broadcasts, the same way I heard about the arrest. I had the window out towards the street standing wide open, I recall, and while the reporter slowly read the brief communiqué, it felt as if the whole city was holding its breath. For a few seconds at least, and it was a strange experience to say the least. I can still recall it without any difficulty whatsoever.

  Mariam Kadhar guilty.

  Otto Gerlach guilty.

  Murder in the first degree.

  Beyond all doubt. Unanimous jury. The length of the sentences was not yet established, but there was nothing that indicated that it would be anything other than the maximum. Twelve years for both of them.

  No extenuating circumstances. Neither of them more or less guilty than the other. No pardon.

  I turned off the radio and the city welled in through the window again.

  About a day later – on Saturday afternoon – Kerr called and reported that the sales figures were calculated to be up to forty-five thousand, and that the second printing (of fifty thousand new copies) was now done. He asked if I needed more money, and I thanked him for another small advance.

  I got drunk that evening. Also went home with a woman to her apartment on Max Willemstraat, but I don’t think either she or I had very much pleasure from our meagre intercourse on her living room floor.

  In any case not her.


  Then on Sunday – Sunday 16 May – Haarmann reported that Elmer van der Leuwe would arrive at S–haufen the same evening, and that he intended to resume his interrupted surveillance.

  Under the assumption that it was still my wish to find my missing wife, that is?

  It was, I explained, and hung up. Got up, went to the kitchen and took two tablets for a rather emphatic headache. A little surprised, I then noticed that it was raining – a lukewarm and gentle spring rain – and that a growing wet spot had formed inside the open balcony door.

  It was Doris with the freckles – at Vlissingen there were two waitresses named Doris, both about twenty-five, both blonde, both beautiful in that cool northern European way, but only one of them had freckles – Doris with the freckles, that is, who sometime shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon raised a hushing finger and turned up the volume on the TV, which was hanging from the ceiling in a corner of the place at the very back.

  I have thought back numerous times to this brief news broadcast. The experience I immediately took with me when I left Vlissingen was that it must have been some kind of slow-motion broadcast, because afterwards it all lingered with such absurd clarity: the reporter’s eyes a little too wide-open, as if she herself did not really believe what she was communicating; her voice, her occupational phrasing and professional indifference, balancing over an abyss of suppressed excitement.

  And the pictures.

  Of the jail. Of the corridor. Of the cell door and of the policewoman who quite dispassionately answered the off-camera reporter’s questions into a blue microphone with the Channel 5 emblem.

  And the words that fell still stick with me, and in the corner of my eye I see how Doris is forgetting to smoke so that the pillar of ash on her cigarette finally becomes top-heavy from waiting and falls off.

  ‘Can you tell us what happened?’ the reporter asks, coughing two times, once right into the microphone.